prof.dr. Aard Groen

Aard Groen holds a full professor position on entrepreneurship & valorization at the University of Groningen. Groen is Dean entrepreneurship at the University of Groningen. Founder of University of Groningen Centre of Entrepreneurship. Until beginning of 2020 Groen also held a full professor position on Innovative Entrepreneurship at the University of Twente, he was in 2001 co-founder of NIKOS centre of entrepreneurship at the University of Twente. Groen is a leader in designing successful entrepreneurship accelerators and university entrepreneurship education programs, in the Netherlands, and internationally in countries such as Russia, India, China. His research focuses on knowledge intensive entrepreneurship in start ups and existing ventures across a range of advanced technology sectors. His keynotes on university-industry collaboration, technology commercialization, key competencies for entrepreneurship, and leveraging networks for business development are featured at international conferences and symposia. Professor Groen teaches on innovation, entrepreneurship, marketing and business development. Groen is adviser to several startups and growing companies and advice committees for example for EIT, NWO, SNN. Dr. Groen has written extensively on developing start-up and enterprise-scale businesses by leveraging industrial and international networks. His papers have been published in the Journal of Management, International Journal of Small Business, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Social Science & Medicine, Technovation and elsewhere (For his publications, please refer to Google Scholar: http://bit.ly/1jhj5Iq ). He has been a co-founder of several entrepreneurship minor programs, accelerator trainings, and teaches courses on entrepreneurship, innovation, marketing and methodology on all academic levels. Dr. Groen has led multiple EU projects and is presently an advisor to several companies. He was also an advisor to the European Institute of Technology’s Information and Communications Technology Labs (EIT-Digital) network serving companies including Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Philips, Nokia, Ericsson and others from 2010 till 2014, and is now involved in EIT-innoenergy, and EIT-Health. Furthermore, dr. Groen has been a member of accreditation committees for academic programs on business & entrepreneurship. Groen is owner of Venturelab International Holding Bv, which is an impact oriented enterprise for stimulation of methods to support entrepreneurs such as the Venturelab accelerator method. Groen serves in several public boards for subsidy project assessment. T: +31 50 363 6543 E: a.j.groen@rug.nl